I dislike all forms of censorship of lawful speech, whether it's coming from the Left or the Right. And the spirit of the First Amendment is what matters. I do understand that private sites can censor your lawful speech legally, but I still think it's somewhat morally wrong to do so.

In the 2010s and 2020s the censorship[1] (and cancelling of open-source software authors) is coming mostly from the Left - and I hate it.

In the 1990s the censorship was coming from the Right - and I hated that as well. I still remember a group called "Focus on the Family" and its pressure on the government to adopt widespread Internet filtering.

I have no problem with trans people in any way whatsoever, what they do with their bodies and in their private lives is absolutely none of my business. I only get annoyed when segments of their political movement start to enact speech codes[1] and other means of impeding our right to freedom of speech. I understand it doesn't mean all trans people are doing this, it is just a vocal minority.

To clarify: When I complain about "Woke" I complain about those people within the movement who are trying to take our hard-earned Western liberties away, including freedom of speech and thought. These liberties were acquired over hundreds of years of hardship by so many people, throughout history. People who chose to suffer in the name of liberty, for the good of other people. And certain segments of the Left want to diminish or even eliminate them.

And by the way I agree with the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, yes there is a serious problem with discrimination against Black people by law enforcement. And other minorities too. Those with less power in society tend to be discriminated against the worst. It really does appear to be a "pecking order", almost something from the animal world, which is terrible.

But I still don't think censorship (and especially cancelling people) is ever a suitable response to discrimination or offensive speech. Offensive speech should be countered with further, lawful speech.

The quoted text in my first post above is taken from the book, it's not my specific personal opinion. If it were to be the case that Extinction Rebellion and other peaceful protest groups were to be labelled "extremist" I would be seriously considering that we are living in a police state. It's completely unacceptable to brand peaceful political movements as "extremist" to me. That has no place in a free society.

As demonstrated before by history, I'm worried that the left-wing Woke movement might provoke a right-wing backlash, and it's why Trump or someone even worse could get into power at some point. I think we need to keep protecting our individual liberties, so people don't end up voting a right wing party into power, as a knee-jerk reaction.

I hope I've thought it all through properly. So it looks like I'm a bit of a fence sitter on the matter, but are still strongly in favor of individual liberty.

By the way, many of my posts here are getting 50:50 with an almost equal number of upvotes as they are downvotes. Many just "0", or "1", but not -1 or any worse than that. So HN opinion seems to be split on it?

1. The "Contributor Covenant" code of conduct and others. These codes of conduct are the main censorship issue I'm bothered about nowadays.